News Brief: Jordanian Students Translate Alice 3 Software Into Arabic

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's popular educational software tool, Alice 3, is now available in Arabic thanks to a four-month translation project that involved university students across Jordan working with CMU and the Oracle Academy.

"Alice has been running successfully in all countries in the Middle East for many years, but we were conscious that we could reach more students if the program were in a language with which they were more familiar," said Jane Richardson, EMEA Director of the Oracle Academy. "We were delighted when Carnegie Mellon University — the creators of Alice — gave us an opportunity to approach universities in the country to enlist the help of student volunteers to drive the translation process."

Members of CMU's Alice Project team demonstrated the Arabic translation at SIGSCE 2014, the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education in Atlanta. The Arabic translation is included in downloads of the latest version, Alice 3.1.92.0.0, released March 7.

"We were pleased to collaborate with the students at Hashemite University, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, and Philadelphia University, their advisers, and the Oracle Academy," said Wanda Dann, director of the Alice Project. "Their contribution was invaluable in creating Alice 3 in Arabic."

Alice is a platform created to teach students object-oriented programming by engaging them in a fun activity: making animated movies and games. Alice software tools — Alice 2 for teaching fundamental programming concepts, and Alice 3 for teaching students who are learning Java — are downloaded more than a million times a year.